Following on from my post last week about speeding up my home network, I noticed that my connection has still been quite slow when viewing websites. I have a steady 72Mbps down / 19Mbps up connection so that wasn’t the issue which narrowed it down to being either something wrong with my laptop or my DNS.

A little while ago, I found a great little app called namebench which searches through all kinds of DNS providers to find you the best speed. It was created by some Google engineers during their 20% time and works on OS X, Windows, and Linux. I usually use it as soon as I get a new machine but I’d forgotten to run it following my update to Yosemite which involved a fresh install. As it turns out, my home BT DNS is terrible and namebench managed to find some BT DNS servers that were 245% faster! Now my browser is flying along and it feels like I have a totally new connection.

I’d thoroughly recommend giving namebench a try - it’s totally free and takes around 15 minutes but you may end up with a much faster connection at the end of it.